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Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium Architecture Books Architecture 3-7-2018 Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium Jelena Bogdanovic Iowa State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/arch_books Part of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Architectural History and Criticism Commons, Byzantine and Modern Greek Commons, and the Historic Preservation and Conservation Commons Recommended Citation Bogdanovic, Jelena, "Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium" (2018). Architecture Books. 7. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/arch_books/7 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Architecture at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Architecture Books by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium Edited by Jelena Bogdanović Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium seeks to reveal Christian understanding of the body and sacred space in the medieval Mediterranean. Case studies examine encounters with the holy through the perspective of the human body and sensory dimensions of sacred space, and discuss the dynamics of perception when experiencing what was constructed, represented, and understood as sacred. The comparative analysis investigates viewers’ recognitions of the sacred in specific locations or segments of space with an emphasis on the experiential and conceptual relationships between sacred spaces and human bodies. This volume thus reassesses the empowering aspects of space, time, and human agency in religious contexts. By focusing on investigations of human endeavors towards experiential and visual expressions that shape perceptions of holiness, this study ultimately aims to present a better understanding of the corporeality of sacred art and architecture. The research points to how early Christians and Byzantines teleologically viewed the divine source of the sacred in terms of its ability to bring together – but never fully dissolve – the distinctions between the human and divine realms. The revealed mechanisms of iconic perception and noetic contemplation have the potential to shape knowledge of the meanings of the sacred as well as to improve our understanding of the liminality of the profane and the sacred. Jelena Bogdanović is Associate Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University, USA. Trained as an architect and an historian of art and architecture, she specializes in the architectural history of Byzantine, Slavic, Western European, and Islamic cultures in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium Jelena Bogdanović, ed. Contents: List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Encounters with the Holy Jelena Bogdanović Part I THE IMMATERIAL AND PLACELESS SACRED Chapter 1 Images of Invisible Beauty in the Aesthetic Cosmology of Dionysius the Areopagite Filip Ivanović Part II THE SACRED MADE PALPABLE Chapter 2 Monumental Icons and Their Bodies in Early Christian Rome and Byzantium Maria Lidova Chapter 3 Imperial Bodies and Sacred Space? Imperial Images between Monumental Decoration and Space Definition Maria Cristina Carile Chapter 4 The Influence of Icons on the Perception of the Human Body Katherine Marsengill Part III THE SACRED DELIVERED Chapter 5 Delivering the Sacred: Representing Translatio on the Trier Ivory Ljubomir Milanović Chapter 6 Bodies in Motion: Visualizing Trinitarian Space in the Albenga Baptistery Nathan S. Dennis Chapter 7 A Mobile Dialogue of an Immobile Saint: St. Symeon the Younger, Divine Liturgy, and the Architectural Setting Ayşe Belgin-Henry Chapter 8 Framing Glorious Spaces in the Monastery of Hosios Loukas Jelena Bogdanović Conclusions: Iconic Perception and Noetic Contemplation of the Sacred Jelena Bogdanović with Katherine Marsengill Bibliography Index Introduction: Encounters With the Holy Jelena Bogdanović This book Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium joins the burgeoning scholarship on the sacred and, by asking questions about the ways medieval people encountered the holy, offers new perspectives on the understanding of the role of the body and perceptible dimensions of sacred space in the medieval Mediterranean. For the Christians in the medieval Mediterranean, “the sacred” became manifested through the presence of Christ, who “became flesh and tabernacled among us” (Jn 1:14). For the devotees, the humanity of Jesus Christ resulted into interconnected notions about the holy expressed through the human body and place as a segment of space that is physical, localized, specific, and rational.1 However, in Christian terms, the seemingly stark divisions between body and soul, mind and senses, place and space in the abstract are constantly negotiated and balanced between God’s revelation among humans in the locales of inhabited space and ultimately the immaterial and placeless God.2 Moreover, as Michel de Certeau contends, the encounters with the holy for Christians imply their relationships to God as the event of Jesus Christ.3 Indeed, de Certeau is correct that the event of Christ inaugurated Christianity but also subsequent events within the life of the church, which are seemingly paradoxical as they are necessarily different from the first, inaugural event while at the same time are perceived as being focused on and faithful to this foundational event.4 When analyzing place, memory, and identity of the sacred, Philip Sheldrake wittingly remarked that even the place of Jesus, the Tomb of Christ, which is conspicuously empty of any bodily remains, points to the perpetual movement of the faithful “following after” the divine in the direction of Jesus’ departure.5 Therefore, the holy is never inactive and, even if perceived through bodily senses and the physical characteristics of space, for the believers remains inclusive of its abstract qualities. Yet, how do we study these encounters with the holy? Scholarly studies of the sacred are continually suspended between positivist and interpretative studies; between the increasingly theorizing search for objective and objectified understanding of the sacred studied through palpable and verifiable references and those searches that attempt to address, albeit uncomfortably, the elusive, abstract, and ideal features of the sacred and questions as how given individuals within given contexts interpret these abstract qualities of sacred phenomena. Hence, many studies of the sacred, regardless of the primary interest of the discipline in the material world, revolve around the understanding of the material, inhabited world as critical for the perception of the holy. Various phenomenological approaches address the cognitive understanding of direct experiences related to body and space. Semiotics enriches the ways in which we make meaning of various material objects associated with the holy. For archeologists, art and architectural historians of the medieval Mediterranean, the starting point in material culture comes as an expected response. However, in the parlance of the current scholarly discourse on the sacred and its corporeality, the scholarly split is grounded in the very definition of the sacred and how the sacred relates to the forces (agents) that mediate the sacred and the capacity (agency) of the sacred to act in a given locale. At the risk of oversimplification, as Sonia Hazard reasons, it can be stated that for some researchers, the sacred is a constructed socio-political discourse amongst humans as agents, recurrently studied as cohesive, idealized groups as mediatory forces that allow us to address the agency of the sacred through the contextualized material world.6 Other scholars align with teleological views, looking at the final causes, design, and purpose in the abstract, wherein the material world is acting as an agent and is mediating the ideal, divine agency. In each case, human agency and the locale of the sacred remain present in these scholarly debates. Human agency is examined either through the human body most literally understood or various material objects that reflect the embodiment of human encounters with the holy, while the locale of the sacred is habitually examined through various material forms of framing the sacred space. The various approaches used, however, even if not mutually exclusive, are often conflicting in that they offer different conclusions and hence are rarely simultaneously used and balanced within selected studies. Hence, most studies examine “the sacred” from the perspective of the creation of sacred space, while others turn to the body. Without going into detailed historiographical overview, from the perspective of sacred space in particular, the core of the division between the positivist and non-positivist studies can be related to Émile Durkheim’s and Mircea Eliade’s7 paradigmatic distinction between “the sacred” and “the profane” as a characteristic of all religious beliefs. Their approach was received with some opposition by those who study the holy. Eliade defined the sacred as a transcendent reference to God, positioned the holy in space, time, and cosmology, and explained that the holy becomes accessible to religious people (homo religiosus) through the breakthrough experience
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